His face went still. “She wasn’t doing math.”
“Everyone does math, Ellis. They see you with me and they recalculate. Every single person. Your coworkers will. Your gym buddies will. Your parents definitely will. And Hannah just did, even though she was coolabout it. Megan did when you told her last month. She said all the right things, but you saw the recalculation happen behind her eyes.”
He was quiet for a long beat. The café noise filled the space between us. Espresso machines, someone’s laptop keyboard, a toddler shrieking about a muffin three tables over.
“Do you know why I said ‘boyfriend’ to her?” he asked.
“Because she’s not your team lead?”
“Because she mattered.” He leaned forward, both arms on the table. “Because she’s the closest I ever came to admitting I wanted something with anyone. And I never said the word to her. Not once. She asked me, in plain English, what we were doing, and I deflected until she walked away from it. If I can’t say ‘boyfriend’ to her now, about you, then nothing’s actually changed. I’m still that guy. And I’m done being him.”
My throat did something inconvenient. Tightened, I think. Some involuntary betrayal of the cool I was trying to maintain.
“And no,” he said. “I don’t miss the easy version. Whatever I had with Hannah wasn’t easy; it was just expected. Those aren’t the same thing.”
“I know.”
“Do you?” He reached across the table and took the mangled croissant out of my hands. Set it on the plate. Took my hands instead. His thumbs pressed into my palms, warm and deliberate. “Being with you isn’t a hard path, Jett. It’s just a real one.”
I looked down at our hands on the table. Brown and white, his fingers longer, mine broader. In the middle of a coffee shop, on a Saturday morning, where anyone could see.
“You called me your boyfriend.” The word still sat too large to hold.
“I did.”
“To your ex-girlfriend.”
“To anyone who was listening.”
“Without practicing first?”
He laughed, short and surprised. “I didn’t need to practice. Your namecame out and the rest followed. Like it was the easiest thing I’d said all week.”
I looked at him across the table, and for a second, I saw it. All of it. The version of us that could work. Not because it was simple or expected or free of recalculation, but because this man had just stood up in a coffee shop and claimed me to the one person who represented everything he was leaving behind, and he’d done it like breathing.
“Buy me another croissant.” I pushed the empty plate toward him. “You owe me. I stress-ate that one.”
“You stress-ate a pastry in five minutes?”
“I’m Dominican. We process emotions through carbohydrates.”
He stood up, shaking his head, and went to the counter. I watched him go. Tall, broad, that sleeve tattoo visible below his pushed-up sleeves, moving through the crowd with the quiet confidence of a man who’d just done something brave and didn’t know it yet.
My boyfriend.
The word kept getting bigger every time someone else heard it.
Chapter fifteen
My mom called on Sundays. Always Sundays, always between noon and one, always right when I was in the middle of something. She had a sixth sense for interrupting momentum. I was convinced she’d developed it during my childhood and had never turned it off.
This particular Sunday I was at Ellis’ apartment, tangled up on his couch in that boneless way where neither of us had committed to being vertical yet. His legs were across my lap, he was reading something on his tablet, and I was scrolling through vendor quotes for a corporate gala I was planning for a biotech startup that wanted “elevated but approachable,” which meant absolutely nothing but they were paying well.
My phone buzzed. The screen lit up with MAMI and a photo from ten years ago. Her at my cousin Daniela’s quinceañera, red lipstick, hair pinned up, looking like she owned every room she’d walked into. Because she did.
I hit accept before I could think about it, which was my first mistake. You don’t answer a call from Carmen Villanueva-Castillo without a game plan.
“Mijo.” Her voice was warm and immediate, like she’d been mid-sentence before dialing and was just continuing a conversation she’d started in her head. “You haven’t called me.”
